Interior takes financial management system to an enterprise cloud

FBMS provides the administrative backbone to support DOI’s financial transactions, acquisitions, travel, grants and subsidies, and property and fleet management functions across 60 offices. When fully deployed, it will replace and/or integrate 160 of Interior's 162 legacy business systems and subsystems, according to the agency website.

Virtustream, a provider of cloud software and services, is working with prime contractor Unisys to move the financial management system, which is based on SAP software, to its Virginia-based data center, which complies with security guidelines stipulated by the Federal Information Systems Management Act (FISMA).

SAP application hosting is the first project Interior officials and contractors are tackling as the department expedites its move to the cloud. In August, Interior awarded a set of contracts valued at up to $10 billion to 10 vendors in a bid to transform overall IT capabilities.

Additional services will include virtual machines, storage, database hosting, secure file transfers and Web hosting, as well as development and test environments. The contracts will not only allow Interior to move these apps to the cloud, but move them in a well-planned, methodical way, Andrew Jackson, Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for Technology, Information and Business Services, wrote in a blog post in August. Interior expects to save $100 million each year from 2016 to 2020 by moving applications to the cloud.

Virtustream is SAP-certified in both cloud and hosting services. The company is currently going through the process to get security accreditation for its enterprise cloud under the federal government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, said Kevin Dattolico, chief sales officer for Virtustream.

The company’s infrastructure-as-a- service cloud, powered by its xStream cloud management software and micro-VM technology help users and cloud providers take a close look at what resources are being consumed in the cloud. Virtustream describes micro-VM, or μVM, as a fine-grained unit of measurement designed to fairly and accurately measure the actual consumption of cloud resources in all types of clouds – private, public or hybrid. In the Virtustream cloud, users are charged based on a “true consumption-based pricing model,” in which they pay only for the aggregate number of μVMs that they actually use, in five-minute increments. Each resource is measured separately, so that users with a diverse portfolio of workloads or workloads that use large amounts of a single resource (such as compute-intensive applications) are effectively only charged for their use of that resource. The unused μVM resources are consumed by other workloads, according to company officials.